There Really is No Such Thing as Communism, Socialism, Progressivism etc. Because....

Republicans are notorious for screaming that the Democrats are socialists and communists.   The Democrats scream that the Republicans are the capitalist Great Satan pigs who must be destroyed for the collective good of humanity.  The truth? Capitalism and free markets no longer exist in America but fascism runs wild as an insidious prosperity destroying disease.  If one truly examines all the 'ism's' that folks endlessly obsess about including communism, socialism, progressivism, fascism, state run capitalism, statism etc., they all boil down to essentially the same thing:  totalitarian control of all people and resources by a handful of ruling elites who grow filthy rich by concentrating all wealth and power.  Why worry over mere semantics when the end result is the same?

Interestingly, China is a case study in communism as well as the massive concentration of wealth and power, as documented by Bloomberg.

Mapping China’s Red Nobility 

Bloomberg News mapped the families of Communist China’s “Eight Immortals” to reveal the origins of princelings, an elite class that has been able to amass wealth and influence, and exploit opportunities unavailable to most Chinese. Bloomberg tracked 103 people – descendants including children, grandchildren and great grandchildren, and their respective spouses. The Immortals, now all dead, are revered in communist lore as revolutionary fighters who led China’s economic opening after Mao Zedong’s death. The identities and business dealings of these families are often cloaked in secrecy because of state censorship and complex corporate webs. To document them, Bloomberg scoured thousands of pages of corporate filings, property records, official websites and archives, and conducted dozens of interviews from China to the United States, where many were educated and have at times made their homes.

Those who cling to the warm and fuzzy notion that statism and collectivism are somehow caring, paternal and compassionate are somewhere between severely uninformed or downright stupid.  Collectivism is the most failed ideology in human history, yet folks continue to aspire to it as the noblest of ideas that will satisfy every human want if only the government had enough power.  Well, communist nations had all the power any tyrant could possible hope to achieve and their only achievement in the name of humanity was the biggest pile of dead bodies in history.   It's well documented that communism killed 100 million folks during the 20th century alone, and mostly through starvation attributable to collectivization and central planning.  Life is always cheap and expendable when worship of the state is the only imperative as well as an exalted god that must be obeyed.

The Worker's Paradise in the communist Soviet Union and elsewhere turned out to be a big bust when the impoverished, suffering and hungry proletariat took a peek at their working class comrades in nations with respectable levels of economic freedom.  What a shock!  The working class dudes in those evil capitalist nations were enjoying prosperity and consumer goodies on a scale unheard of in the commie Workers Paradises.   In capitalist nations, the poor were joining the middle class and for the first time in human history the people rather than the ruling aristocracy were actually building wealth and power.

It was a monumental leap for humankind because wealth and power was finally being widely diffused and disbursed among the people for the first time in human history.  Effectively, free markets and property rights represented a transfer of wealth and power from the 1% to the 99%.  For clearly obvious reasons the ruling class panicked because they were no longer in control as their absolute power and privileges were acutely threatened.

Once upon a time the world was owned and controlled by kings and queens, princes and princesses, lords and ladies, and absolute rulers. There were the ruling elites, the upper class, the propertied class, the moneyed class, the educated class, the bureaucratic class and everybody else was a serf of sorts and expected to be compliant slaves – that’s what slaves do, they serve their masters. Such was the fate of humanity for thousands of years. The 1% and the 99% have existed for as long as humans have existed.

Then the unthinkable happened. In Europe, Western Civilization was born as folks started to clamor for political rights, property rights and natural rights. Monarchies began to topple, theocratic powers were usurped and the revolution for human liberty began. Although Europe was a bloodbath on and off for nearly a millennium, the great political theorists and intellectual challengers who conceived and fought to implement such foreign concepts as non-repressive forms of government and individual sovereignty finally succeeded. Eventually, limited personal freedoms and rights translated into much wider economic freedoms which elevated industry and trade while spawning an economically strong middle class.

Throughout the process, we all learned that the vast human potential so inherent in the minds and souls of free thinking human beings is, ultimately, the only catalyst for progress and civilization, without which there can no civilizations, at least none worth noticing or experiencing. Great societies and human liberation are soul mates.

The grand experiment worked wonders as power and wealth was shifting away from the 1% and to the 99%. Shorn of their shackles, mankind prospered for the first time in human history and at an unprecedented rate. A strong and flourishing middle class was born as free markets were delivering good and services, and prosperity for the masses (99%) was achieved. There was peace instead of war and government had limited powers.

But the 1% started screaming “holy shit, we can’t let that happen. We can’t allow the lowlife people and the unwashed masses to prosper with free markets and sound money so we will work to transfer that power back to us.”

Instead of using armies and violence to subdue the people, the ruling class hatched an extraordinarily clever ballot box scheme - democracy (unlimited majority mob rule) would be used to control and manipulate the people into peacefully transferring their power back to the ruling class by conferring voter approved legitimacy upon them.

Throughout most of human history, the people were barely tossed subsistence level crumbs while their overlords lavishly feasted on the finest of everything because they alone controlled all property, all resources and all of humanity.  Human rights, civil rights, property rights and economic liberty dramatically changed the equation.

But lo and behold, the people in America and Europe began to reject the responsibility of liberty and started voting to deliver themselves back into the bondage and shackles of the elites.  The elites of government offered them 'free everything' in exchange for relinquishing their liberty.  Of course, those promises will not be kept.  Just asked the Greeks.  But once liberty is lost and humankind is once again back in the shackles of government, the fiat central banksters and the elites, there is no saddle to mount to escape the tyranny, despotism and misery.

Yet, there are numerous folks in America and Europe who continue to vote for centralized powers, bigger government, massive taxes, income redistribution and the wholesale slaughter of civil and economic liberties. Such folks cling to a dangerous and deadly delusion.

If we think we are suffering now, we have only just begun to reap the poison harvest of a statist economy because the real misery has yet to hit us. When it does, the pinchers of the totalitarian state will really start snuffing out life ruthlessly and brutally. The totalitarian nations wallowing in Marxism/socialism/oligarchy/fascism/statism will always resort to the same tactics as Stalin and Mao who snuffed out 100,000,000 folks during the 20th century alone.

The only difference between the economies of Mao/Stalin that murdered 100 million folks and the so-called soft socialism of the West is that the former never had the luxury of a wealthy and productive economy to loot and plunder. Soon enough though, we will be fully plundered.

Meanwhile, the American people are drinking copious amounts of “Foolaid” as we cling to the delusion that government is the cornucopia of plenty. The lion’s share of the plunder generated by the governments looting machine only accrues to a few elites and insider power players because that's is precisely how statism has always worked throughout history.   The rest are lucky if they are tossed a few crumbs and those crumbs are rapidly dwindling.

How Statism and the NWO Will Crash and Burn

If anything, government is an optimistic entity that automatically assumes that the economy will always do well, and perpetually and generously fill government coffers with an abundance of tax revenues. However, the decline and fall of the global economy has badly dinged tax collections. If folks aren't prosperous and making money, the plundering government's cut shrinks and shrinks substantially.

Government survives by either brute force or with the voluntary consent of the people because they perceive a value. But what happens when folks no longer perceive a value in government? Well, folks just opt out of the system, go underground and/or overtly or covertly indulge in non-compliance. When this happens, we see headlines and stories like this:

Island authorities denounce attack on tax police

ATHENS, Greece -- Local authorities on the Greek island of Hydra have denounced an attack by a local crowd on tax police after they detained a restaurant owner who did not provide receipts to clients.

The Friday incident happened after the inspectors wanted to transport the restaurant owner to Athens, an hour's ride away by fast boat. They were set upon by a local crowd, which also attacked the boat's crew.

The police, along with the restaurant owner, had to retreat to the island's police station, which was besieged until riot police arrived Saturday morning. Locals cut off the station's electricity and water supplies.

The Greeks have a long history of refusing to pay taxes to its corrupt and thieving government. However, the Greeks are far from the only folks indulging in a tax revolt. In Germany, statist socialists are alleging that Germans who put their money in Swiss banks are tax cheats who should be imprisoned.

German opposition leader attacks Swiss banks

Gabriel, whose Social Democrats (SPD) have blocked a deal between the German and Swiss governments to levy taxes on German assets in Swiss bank accounts, told Deutschlandfunk that Swiss banking practices in Germany were comparable with organised crime.

"It's a serious crime," said Gabriel, the chairman of the SPD who may run against Chancellor Angela Merkel in the 2013 election. "We're talking about organised crime in Swiss banks (operating) in Germany."

Gabriel, who plans to make criticism of banks a centrepiece of the SPD's 2013 campaign, added the sentence for large-scale tax evasion in Germany could be as long as 10 years in prison.

In Italy, another nation quite notorious for tax avoidance, the desperately broke Italian government is beefing up tax collection efforts.

Italy's tax hunters target super-rich and their yachts off the Sardinian coast

There used to be a time when Italy's super-rich gravitated to the smartest enclaves of Sardinia for a summer of relaxation and luxury. Not any more. In an increasingly austerity-conscious country, the yacht-owning classes are coming under increasing and unwelcome scrutiny, some of which would not look out of place in a scene from the film Apocalypse Now.

"We first spotted the targets with the helicopter's radar and closed in to identify about 50 boats off the two islands," said Italian coastguard captain Pietro Mele, describing a recent raid on yachts suspected of straying too close to the coast.

Although these are only a few examples of governments' insatiable appetite for other peoples money and how people fight back, the stone cold reality is that western governments have been indulging in unsustainable spending sprees for decades. Now that the massive pile of unsustainable debt is evidenced everywhere, another stone cold reality that directly impacts the people is the austerity of cutting public services because bigger and bigger percentages of national income are diverted to debt service. Tax receipts are going to the banksters and not the people.

In a bad and worsening economy, such a situation is the sum of all fears for the government. Not only do governments lack the resources to fund entitlements and public services, they've lost the trust of the people who are waking up to another reality, namely, that a big spending corrupt government wasn't such a good idea after all.

As the world unwinds according to the laws of financial physics and the fictitious fiat monetary paradise implodes, folks will be forced to plunge into raw survival mode as they seek and invent new paradigms of survival that most assuredly won't include trust in government and its army of bureaucratic goons. .

Meanwhile, folks accustomed to feeding off of everybody else will indeed clamor for a more violent and draconian government that will militarily plunder everybody and everything. But there comes a point when there is nothing left to plunder.

The only difference between the murderous and ruthless tactics of Mao/Stalin and Gang who killed 100 million folks during the 20th century alone, and the so-called soft socialism of the west is that the former didn't have the luxury of a wealthy economy to plunder. Well, the plundering class is rapidly running out of options because there isn't much left to plunder which is why the hysteria is now focused on 'tax the rich'. In France, the socialists have passed a law imposing a 75% tax on the rich. What will happen is that what productive capital that remains in socialist France will simply pack up and move to friendlier abodes. The French economy will be deprived of scare financial resources to reboot its ailing economy, the economy will worsen and French misery will intensify. Socialists never think about the future and merely dwell on the immediate and politically expedient that invariably includes class warfare.

At this juncture, it's safe to assume that the west (Europe and America) are going down and it won't be a soft landing. Things are about to get a whole lot worse, it's won't be a pretty sight, there will be massive human suffering and probably violence and massive civil unrest.

However, if folks can just resist the temptation to implement more bad government and thieving central banks, they will finally acquire a bright and prosperous future out of the pile of statist rubble.

Simply put, the glutenous beast that is devouring us must be starved if folks are to survive in peace, liberty and prosperity.  

Why Do Republicans Reject the Constitution?

As a Libertarian turned Republican turned Libertarian, one of the most frustration things I've encountered in political life is the fact that Republicans claim they revere the Constitution and liberty.  Moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, Republicans are always accusing me of being a liberal and a socialist!  Republicans need to look in the mirror if they want to see socialists. The grand Republican delusion is that they truly believe that they endorse liberty and constitutional governance.

Yet, Republicans consistently vote for anti-Constitutionalists and big government statists. In fact, Republicans vote against liberty and the Constitution every chance they get. Republicans cheered the Bush era, including No Child Left Behind (written by Ted Kennedy) and Medicare Part D, the multi-trillion dollar prescription drug entitlement.

Why is it that Republican socialism is somehow good while Democrat socialism is bad?  There is no such thing as good socialism or good statism.

For reasons no sane person can fathom, Republicans are notorious for going on a rampage accusing Obama and Gang of being socialists. Republicans and their media mouth pieces have even labeled Obama the 'Food Stamp President'.

The truth?

Bush is the REAL Food Stamp President

It’s true that the most recent figures from the Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service (provided to Factcheck.org/USA Today) show that a record number of people—some 46.2 million—are enrolled in the program. But the same data shows that more individuals were added to the program while George W. Bush was in office than have enrolled under Obama’s presidency: Under Bush, the program grew by 14.7 million individuals; under Obama so far, it’s grown by 14.2 million, and, as of October, was declining.

So Bush wins on volume, and Obama wins on velocity: In just a few years, President Obama managed to expand the program by nearly as much as Bush. But Obama didn’t do it without some help from his Republican predecessor, who approved policy changes that set the stage for the program’s current growth.

To some extent, the food stamps expansion the country has seen under Obama is how food stamps are supposed to work: It’s a countercyclical program, meaning that as the economy declines, enrollment grows. Typically, then, the program grows in recessions and declines in economic boom times. But with the 2002 farm bill, President Bush dramatically expanded eligibility, restoring benefits to nearly a million individuals at the beginning of 2003, and paving the way for the program to expand as it did during the rest of presidency. As a result, Bush managed to oversee unprecedented growth in the program even as the economy grew. Obama then followed up on this with an eligibility expansion of his own in the 2009 stimulus package.

It’s not unreasonable to criticize Obama for the expansion of the food stamps program under his watch. But Obama's Republican critics shouldn’t forget that it was a GOP president who helped make that expansion possible.

Meanwhile, frustrated Republicans just don't understand why Libertarians and constitutionalists just won't hold their noses and vote Republican because as they see it, the Republicans are the lesser of the two evils. But unconstitutional statist evil is still unconstitutional statist evil and Libertarians and constitutionalist see no differences between the Republicans and the Democrats, except for the social issues which they don't care about anyway because they correctly perceive that the theocrats are anti-natural rights advocates who seek to criminalize every possible human behavior that they don't like.

I don't know what will happen in November but I do believe that the advantage goes to Obama simply because the Republican Party has totally wimped out and failed to distinguish itself on critically important issues. 

Meanwhile, I urge Republicans to read the Constitution, here, especially Article 1, Section 8, that lists the specific enumerated powers granted to the federal government by the states that created the Constitution.  The Federal government has no constitutional right or authority to do anything that it wasn't specifically authorized to do.  Our founders worked hard to limit Federal powers and now we've got "Fedzilla Gone Wild".  

The Government Subsidizes Junk Food and the Costly Lifestyle Diseases Resulting from Poor Nutrition

If there ever was a defining characteristic of insanity, it's got to be the US government. Only in America are taxpayers forced to subsidized unhealthy bad food that results in expensive to maintain lifestyle diseases that are also publicly funded. The Big Food and Big Pharm lobbies are determined to perpetually guarantee big profits through mandates and subsidies. The marriage of big government and big business has churned Americans into fat pharmaceutical dependent blimps.

Cato has a fascinating piece on this issue.

How Uncle Sam's Making Us Fat

The US Department of Agriculture is Exhibit A for foolish, wasteful federal policymaking: It spends billions subsidizing the same unhealthy foods it tells us to avoid.

This year, the USDA will spend more than $1 billion subsidizing the growth of four common food additives: corn syrup, high-fructose corn syrup, corn starch and soy oils (hydrogenated vegetable oil).

These additives "provide a cheap dose of sweetness and fat to a wide variety of junk food products," warns the US Public Interest Research Group. PIRG found that the USDA spent $18.2 billion from 1995 to 2011 to subsidize junk-food additives.

Yet, while some of your tax dollars pay for these junk-food additives, more pay for public-health education campaigns that strive to convince us to eat less and to eat better.

The USDA lectures and hectors us to avoid anything that's fatty, salty, sugary or filled with processed ingredients — like the ones our tax dollars subsidize.

Clearly, the Agriculture Department puts the D in double standard: The bureacuracy's left hand is at war with its right.

The government doesn't just subsidize nasty things like the manufacture of HFCS and hydrogenated oils, it also subsidizes the retail sale of these nasty products with food stamp subsidies.  Food stamps have been renamed SNAP, Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, although there's nothing nutritious about the program.  Even liberal organizations are waking up to the stone cold reality that the government subsidizes junk food that makes folks sick and unhealthy. The farm bill passed by Congress is loaded with all kinds of subsidy horrors

Farm Bill Jackpot – How Much do Corporations Benefit from SNAP?

* Powerful food industry lobbying groups such as the American Beverage Association and the Snack Food Association teamed up to oppose health-oriented improvements to SNAP, at times working with anti-hunger groups

* At least nine states have proposed bills to make health-oriented improvements to SNAP, but none have passed, in part due to opposition from the food industry In one year, nine Walmart Supercenters in Massachusetts together received more than $33 million in SNAP dollars—over four times the SNAP money spent at farmers markets nationwide

*In two years, Walmart received about half of the one billion dollars in SNAP expenditures in Oklahoma

* J.P. Morgan Chase holds contracts in 24 states to administer SNAP benefits, indicating concentrated power and a lack of competition

*In New York, a seven-year deal originally paid J.P. Morgan Chase $112 million for EBT services, and was recently amended to add $14.3 million—an increase of 13 percent States are seeing unexpected increases in administrative costs, while banks and other private contractors are reaping significant windfalls from the economic downturn and increasing SNAP participation.

While food stamps supporting liberals are not exactly recognizing that the government freebies that they so cherish are unhealthy, they are beginning to wake up to the reality and some of them are lobbying for nutritional improvement in the junk food laden food stamp program.

As a Libertarian, I oppose the food stamp program.  That said, I don't believe it will ever vanish.  However, it can be vastly improved by restricting food stamp use to fruits, vegetable, meats and dairy. Food stamp users are notorious for loading up with junk food, sugary cereals for their kids and soda.  They don't have the common sense to eat sensibly which is precisely why junk food needs to be banned from the food stamp program.

But there's a hugely expensive companion problem to the food stamp insanity and junk food subsidies.  Bad food results in lifestyle diseases that are very expensive to treat.  Not only are American taxpayers forced to pay for the junk food that makes folks sick with lifestyle diseases, they are also forced to pay for their healthcare.  In fact, Medicare and Medicaid are costing American taxpayers near $1 trillion a year, here.

With 60% of the American people already on some form of taxpayer subsidized healthcare, America is already a socialist nation and most Americans absolutely do demand government provided healthcare and other entitlements.  Support for Medicare, Medicaid and other government programs remains quite strong. Americans are just like everybody else – they want something for free (translation: at the expense of somebody else) but there is no such thing as a free anything and anything the government does is very costly, inefficient and life threatening.

America spends more on healthcare than any industrialized nation and by a very wide margin.

Also, there is no corresponding increase in American longevity considering the huge amount of money we pour into health care. In fact, we keep going backwards, 3rd world nations are surpassing us and we ranked 42nd in longevity.

U.S. ranks just 42nd in life expectancy

Americans are living longer than ever, but not as long as people in 41 other countries. For decades, the United States has been slipping in international rankings of life expectancy, as other countries improve health care, nutrition and lifestyles...

Among the other factors:

•Adults in the United States have one of the highest obesity rates in the world. Nearly a third of U.S. adults 20 years and older are obese, while about two-thirds are overweight, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

•“The U.S. has the resources that allow people to get fat and lazy,” said Paul Terry, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Emory University in Atlanta. “We have the luxury of choosing a bad lifestyle as opposed to having one imposed on us by hard times.”

Tragically, American is a nation swimming with fat entitlement dependent pigs. Of course, the government itself is responsible for this nightmare by doling out freebies, free junk food and free healthcare to those who simply refuse to eat or live responsibly.

Kids are eating high calorie, low nutrition diets that primarily consist of simple carbohydrates, sugar, corn syrup, fats and sodium. Much of what kids eat in the schools is taxpayer funded garbage. Even more horrifying is that Migration Information reported that schools actually sell advertising to junk food purveyors by signing “"pouring rights" contracts that permit snack and soft drink companies to advertise to children on school vending machines, scoreboards, book covers, t-shirts, and news programs shown on televisions in the classroom., here.

Only in America do we kill our kids for profit and do it with our tax dollars!!

A group called Healthyamericans.org reported in June 2009 that "Today, we spend nearly $800 billion on health problems that are directly linked to lifestyle and poor health habits each year-about one third of our total health care spending…” and that article was quoting a congress critter, here.

America can't begin to solve its immense economic and fiscal problems because we remain a nation of spoiled rotten morons, from the political class and all the way down to the people who vote to hire the police powers of the state to forcibly steal from somebody else to give them what they think they want or deserve.  So long as folks are allowed to vote for politicians who will keep them fat, lazy, sick and entitlement dependent, the soul of a once proud, independent, prosperous and responsible people will continue to die and morph into something so vile that neither America nor Americans will ever be restored to our glorious legacy of being the the strongest, most prosperous and freest people in human history.

The Free Shit Army Rules

The website Government Gone Wild (governmentgonewild.org) has some incredibly enlightening videos including this short but highly instructive 3 minute video:

 Land of The Freebies, Home of the Enslaved

Americans need to acknowledge the bitter truth: America is no longer the land of the free and the economically prosperous. America is very much a fascist/socialist/entitlement hell that is so typical of every bankrupt western nation that is imploding under the weight of unsustainable entitlements.  Even more disturbing is that both Republican and Democrat voters literally voted for this nightmare that is wiping out the once strong and prosperous middle class.

No one describes the situation better than James Quinn, a brilliantly astute economic pundit whose website, theburningplatform.com, is loaded with extraordinary, insightful and well documented data on the true state of the union.  It's not a pretty sight.

Quinn frequently talks about what he dubs "The Free Shit Army", here.

I've come to the conclusion that the middle class of this country has been caught in a pincer movement by two armies. My definition of the Middle Class is households making between $50,000 and $150,000 per year. The Free Shit Army is attacking us on the left. The middle class has been the backbone of the country, doing the heavy lifting in this country. They get up every morning and trudge off to work to support their families. The Free Shit Army sleeps in. They have chosen to not educate themselves in order to advance in our society.

Politicians have enabled them to stay in poverty by providing welfare, disability, food stamps, and tax incentives that make their lives just comfortable enough to not work. If you provide money to people who are classified as disabled, you get more disabled. The Free Shit Army has 50% more disabled than the general population. If you pay people for not working, why should they work? The middle class works and pays their taxes. These taxes are then redistributed to the Free Shit Army.

The second pincer movement on the middle class has been conducted by a stealthier army. This army has experts in propaganda, misinformation, and obfuscation. I call them the Ruling Elite Army. The generals are the ultra-wealthy CEOs of Wall Street banks and mega-corporations. Their armor divisions are manned by the corporate mainstream media. They are excellent at laying down a great smoke screen before blasting away. The infantry is manned by 535 Congressional officers with thousands of corporate lobbyist foot soldiers. This army has been given the mission to capture the supplies of the middle class.

The middle class were not prepared for the assaults they have been fending off. They became soft and satisfied. They stopped training. They became distracted by their gadgets, delusions of home wealth, and fear of phantom terrorist enemies behind every bush. The propaganda machine of their true enemies has convinced the middle class that foreign enemies are massing. The enemy is within. The middle class will need to sacrifice and go to war against two enemies. Are they up to the task? I'm not sure.

Quinn then offers up real solutions for real problems that are outlined under the following categories: Political System, Economic Policy, Education Policy, Energy Policy, National Defense/Foreign Policy, Immigration and Social Issues.

The cures detailed by James Quinn are pretty much identical to the cures that have been advocated by the good doctor Ron Paul for decades.  Both Quinn and Ron Paul have correctly diagnosed the disease and the medicine required to cure the disease.

It's not likely that the America people will listen to what needs to be done or take the life saving medicine to restore their liberty and prosperity because, well, the people are just too far gone and too corrupted. Once the American people made the ballot box decision to hire the police powers of the government to steal from others at the point of a gun to give them what they demand and and think they deserve, the American people signed their own death warrant and voted themselves into totalitarian slavery. The American people now get to chew on a few crumbs and tossed bones that were picked clean by those who promised them the statist cornucopia of plenty.

For a while, The Free Shit Army and their powerful ally, The Ruling Elite Army, were euphoric.  Everything appeared to be working splendidly, until one day it just was no more.  Just ask the Greeks.  

Is Marxism Back?

In recent years, Marxists and socialists have been euphoric as their delusions kick in and they announce with glee that capitalism has failed and they have the smoking gun proof - collapsed economies and and human misery is piling up everywhere. Not that Marxists or socialists even know anything about capitalism but then again neither do capitalists or those masquerading as capitalists. In Europe, hardcore socialists have been elected, voted out of office and elected again. This happened in France where the French did indeed elect Francois Holland who campaigned on taxing the rich at a rate of 75%. Holland fulfilled his promise, here.

All those warm and fuzzy sounding "ism's" like communism, socialism, Marxism, progressivism, egalitarianism, communitarianism etc. have never really existed. The concept of 'from each according to his ability and to each according to their needs' has not only been proven to be a BIG fail, it's well documented that such ideologies killed 100 million folks during the 20th century alone, mostly by starvation.

Take the collectivist "ism's" and toss in fascism, corporatism, oligarchism and crony capitalism and what you get isn't something that benefits humanity and human prosperity but a monster that merely facilitates the massive concentration of wealth and power. The high ranking communist party officials never suffered and were well supplied with the finest of everything. It was everybody else who waited for hours in a breadline for a loaf of stale and moldy bread.

The west and its so-called 'soft socialism' is sinking faster than the Titanic but this isn't a failure of capitalism.  It's the failure of the evil fascist marriage between Big Government and Big Business that grew government by zapping the wealth of the people.

While I may have a hard time convincing a Republican that fascist crony capitalism is a bad idea and quite destructive to middle class prosperity, I have an even harder time convincing liberals that capitalism truly empowers the 99% at the expense of the 1% and that all forms of statism exclusively benefits the 1% at the expense of the 99%.

 How the 1% Defeated the 99% By Concentrating Wealth and Power

Collectivists everywhere are excited about a new and updated version of The Communist Manifesto. In fact, an economic blog, azizonomics.com, wrote about it in a piece titled Is Marxism Coming Back?

In his introduction to a new edition of The Communist Manifesto, Professor Eric Hobsbawm suggests that Marx was right to argue that the “contradictions of a market system based on no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’, a system of exploitation and of ‘endless accumulation’ can never be overcome...

That's an amazing statement. What is naked self interest, the callous 'cash payment' and a system of exploitation? That's just a dude working to survive and provide for his family. Since when is voluntarily hiring out your skills for wages an act of exploitation? While that's what humans have done since time immemorial, work to survive by making and trading goods and services, the collectivists somehow denigrate work and producing as an undesirable human  character flaw, with the major flaw being that an individual just might want to decide what he wants and needs vs taking orders from the government on his wants and needs.

Amazingly and despite the fact that collectivism vaporized 100 million folks, Professor Hobsbawm does understand that folks will be reluctant to accept Soviet style Marxism. Hobsbawm laments " “It is extremely unlikely that such a ‘post-capitalist society’ would respond to the traditional models of socialism and still less to the ‘really existing’ socialisms of the Soviet era,” and then goes on to suggest that communism will have to be redefined “What forms it might take and how far it would embody the humanist values of Marx’s and Engels’s communism, would depend on the political action through which this change came about.”  While the linking of humanist values to totalitarian collectivist hell  may be a stretch bordering on the lunatic fringe,  it's still a veiled suggestion that social change can and will painlessly produce the acceptance of communism (even though folks may not actually know they are being herded into communism).

With all its flaws and bad and unjust as it is, our deeply problematic corporatist economic system is still a much better deal for humanity than totalitarian collectivism. Still, we must continue to strive to shed the shackles of statism because it's absolutely crucial to human liberty.  Statism never recedes and it always tightens the noose around the necks of human beings until it squeezes the life out of them, their liberty and their prosperity.

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. C.S. Lewis